Our city is being sold off and it is not for our benefit

• GIVEN the blatant financial outcome of the HS2 “arrangements” we see another example of the rot at the heart of the UK.

Private developers are being given our land, our communities, our heritage, to destroy and profit from.

Look into every area of development in London and beyond and cash-strapped councils are rolling over and giving huge money bonanzas to private property development companies.

How? By selling our country to them. In pieces. Large pieces. They own much of the ground we now walk on. They own public buildings and public land. Forever.

During the Brexit debate much has been made of our “sovereignty”. However strangely no one seems to talk about our country being pretty much owned and controlled now by private property developers, most with overseas money behind them.

Also unelected and unaccountable. They are everywhere. Selling “investment” opportunities to overseas buyers and to foreign criminal gangs (look up figures from the Metropolitan police proceeds of crime survey).

They are not building social housing. But they are building “luxury” developments everywhere, pricing most Londoners out of the area they grew up in (and indeed out of London itself), making obscene sums of money at the expense of the general population.

They are the biggest threat to society since the Black Death but go unchallenged, supported by this government, the Mayor of London and, of course our banks.

Try to find truly “affordable” property developments. Try to find new “social housing”. Try to find an inner-city area that’s not becoming overcrowded. It is the exception not the rule. And at its heart is money – vast piles of it.

Not for the good of the many. But for a very, very tiny few. Who will truly benefit from HS2? Who do you think?